You can’t make this stuff up! As I read the nonfiction book Goat Castle by Karen Cox, I pictured trying to sell a novel with its plotline. Starting in Natchez in 1932 as they begin to play up the city’s antebellum character with pilgrimages and house tours, a few of the aristocracy held onto its money and lavish lifestyle, sometimes by being in cahoots with northern magnates. In one of these lavish homes, lives Jennie Merrill, once the outgoing daughter of the Belgian ambassador, but now living the life of a recluse except for her cousin Duncan Minor, who comes over between 8:30 and 9:00 every night and leaves the next morning. In her few excursions around town, she routinely runs stoplights but is never given a ticket.
Next door in another old home that has gone far below being classified as dilapidated and filthy, live a pair of eccentric souls known as the Goat Woman and the Wild Man with a menagerie of animals including goats and other livestock. Richard Dana, the Wild Man, is son of a respected Episcopalian pastor but somewhere things went wrong. He may or may not be a mental case. He spends more nights in the wild than in the filthy house that neither he nor Octavia Dockery, the Goat Woman, own. They keep the property owners at bay with lawsuits and stay as squatters in the house for years.
Already, I could see the editor of a novel saying this is too far out for anyone to believe, even before the constant squabble over the invading animals from next door coming onto Jennie Merrill’s property and her subsequent phone calls to the police leads to her murder. Dana and Dockery enlisted a Black man to rob Jennie, and she is murdered in the attempt. National coverage came to the strange story in the Jim Crow south where the white community demanded justice and somehow sends an innocent Black woman to prison for the murder. In the meantime, Dana and Dockery not only escape punishment but make a profit from their notoriety, selling admissions to see their disheveled house with Dana giving piano performances. Emily Burns, who was little more than a bystander in the robbery and murder, gets a life sentence in Parchman Penitentiary.
Like I said, this is too far-fetched to be made up and could be read as a farce were it not for the very real injustice done to Emily Burns. This strange and fascinating tale is worth the read although I don’t promise that you will find the ending completely satisfactory.